The Haiku for peace quest continues
orb of light
branches cradle sunbeams
until they dance
cradled sunbeams
light dances lost optimism
puts on winter gloves
winter gloves
cradle frozen fingers
reaching for warm
cradle sunbeams
until they dance spring
goodbye winter gloves
(c) Words and Image, June Perkins
The creek is still here
skeleton bush returns bit by bit
but the swinging tree of the waterhole
is gone.
The tiny blue trimmed butterflies hide
with the dandelions
gold and brown ones nestle deep into the green grass
capturing them with camera leaves them free to fly.
Why do some children take the red nets
and break the wings of such beauty,
why can’t they let them be?
Two friends sit at a round table
discussing Emily Dickinson
and how she had to speak to others
from another room.
She needed so much room to write her words
still she hid them away
Butterflies hiding in the grass
sing of Emily
and wonder what she would have
made of cyclones.
(c) Word and images June Perkins
Love need not be spoken
There are no words
Yet the blind king needs more.
His hunger for words that
Feed the need to know his own power
Will forever hold Cordelia captive.
Yet, she is beyond selfishness
Knows love can be divided
And multiplied in its division-
Yet the blind king needs more.
She forgives, accepts her fate
Tries to protect him from inner hate
But in the process to her death she walks
And he is all talk.
While her sisters are still looking for power
They did themselves no favours
The blind king sees more than he wants to see.
The blind king sees
His one daughter who loved him true
He finds self disdain
Cordelia though is beyond his pain
She’s walking in her inner beauty rain
A rain flower to love
She was never so blind.
(c) June Perkins, word and image.
todays webs hang
raindrops of possibility
as nature’s eyes cry
storms trembling trees
see past forest’s danger
as nature’s eyes cry
footpaths gather prints
dance for lost youth dreaming
as nature’s eyes dry
Image and Words by June Perkins
See more Haiku at Thousand Healing Haiku
for Jacque
If only all the tiny shards of glass
bottle brown
wine green
yellow and purple orchid swirls
could talk
What would they say
if fragments realigned
knit themselves back
like broken bones entwined in casts
and heroes walked?
What if the paralysed
could miracle embrace
pain and grief
trauma and loss
till they walked with stars?
I breathe out Vincent’s starry night
from living room wall
to outside door
then coffee table book on my floor
I wonder – would he obsess about lost socks
from cyclone’s past?
(c) June Perkins
I wrote a series of poems tackling the responses and recovery to a cyclone, but they could be relevant to any form of recovery from trauma.
Do bones want to smile
Once the flesh is gone to become
One with the earth?
Do hands want to touch
The freed soul that flies from bones
One with the heavens?
Beauty’s canvas dies
The paint covers abstractions
Becomes impressions.
Impressions of life
Like a lost butterfly’s wing
Fade in artist’s memory
Bones can bring tears
When families’ searches are over
Now peace can be found
Hands cannot reach out
To pull them from fate
One with heavens?
Beauty is unravelled
In agonies of the lost
Truth is found clear
Still waters invite
Midnight runners to find their visions
In a moth’s night touch.
(c) June Perkins
For some background: see
Mona Lisa’s Bones
Skin tastes the season
Knits it to the bone
Frosty footsteps
Eat a dreamer’s skin
Gloved handprints
Scroll phone photo splinters
Eyes speaking life
Embedded dreaming
Life splinters
Into status statements
Season to season
Image to image
Emoting and unleashing
Inner worlds
Memes beckon likes
And stories untold
Knit themselves
From bone to dream
Extract from Life Splinters – a work in progress.
(c) Words and Images June Perkins
It began as a haiku but quickly changed into two line stanzas, so just went with the flow.
It might have some potential as a song. Will think on this piece some more.
Continuing my Haiku Quest to 1000, at 21, want to join me, send an original haiku of your own for healing and I’ll consider posting it at this blog.
I
Even for her
Crow singing tuneless
Missing the upbeat
II
Crow swoops house
Sorrows at my morning
Fate is a song
III
Winter crow songs
leave me sighing
for summer long gone
June Perkins
One day have to get back to this quest and write some more Haiku for healing…
Arranging flowers
Futility finds beauty
Soothing delicately
Purple orchid song
Centres sorrows in the heart
Moment of relief
Friends are found and safe
Many wait for loved one’s news
Relatives still lost
(c) June Perkins all rights reserved
Children of the Activists
We’re the children of the activists
Brought up sleeping on meeting floors and tables
Some of us began with so little understanding
Of what our parents were doing.
But somewhere along the line
It became so very clear
And we followed in their footsteps with just as much of their commitment.
They didn’t need to tell us that this was what we had to do
For they were busy being heroes just doing what had to be done
And in their search for the heroic they sought out others
Who were just as brave.
They and their parents were there
In the Ages of assimilation, integration, survival, repatriation, reconciliation
And these memories will always be with me.
We meet now, and remember those days so long ago
The visitors, the planning, the action
The embassies, the writing, the rewriting of the histories
And we realise that is who we have become.
The active visionaries who build the future for our children as our parents did for us.
Somewhere along the line we came to see the power within us
That they knew was there and
Would not be there without their battling strength and their gatherings.
Gatherings of power
Gatherings of love
Gatherings of vision
Gatherings of growth
Gatherings of beginnings
This is what I see my daughter begin to see
And it only gives more strength to me.
She and others will stage enactments and re-enactments.
Actions will be wedded to them and never be divorced
From
Waves of power
Waves of love
Waves of vision
Waves of growth
Waves of beginnings
For they are also children of the activists
Building
Destinies of love
Destinies of vision
Destinies of growth
Can be their power
Can be their beginning.
june perkins
This poem was written for my PhD Thesis, for an anthology called the Power Sisters.
Ripple Poetry 